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Four-Legged Friends (And Foes)

Welcome back everyone! Hope your holiday season is in full-swing and you're juggling social life with the slew of new games coming down the pipeline! Holster those Red Dead pistols, put Pikachu back in his poke-ball, and step outside your Fallout shelter for a minute to enjoy this new Arcadian Atlas update!

BITE Enhanced Map-Editor

Tis the season for new improvements to our BITE engine, and this go-round we've got a vastly improved mapping interface.

What exactly is new? Well, the UI has been completely re-vamped, enabling quick, at-a-glance organization of tiles from base, half-height, height, slants, mutators, and giant props, as you can see below. There is 0 lag in the new system, a vast improvement over the previous map editor!

Organization and placement of tiles has never been simpler, with individually segmented boxes and easy scrolling through long sheets. Patrick's new BITE engine also boasts incredibly small map files, meaning our maps are now 10 times (that's right, 10 TIMES) smaller than they were before, meaning quicker loading times and smaller file sizes!

And the customization options afforded by BITE means we can now quickly sort by a few simple tile sheets, and even customize each sheet to have special properties all the way down to tile-by-tile specifications. Ever wanted to designate certain tiles land, rock, water, or other spell-related affect tiles? Now we can!

And of course, as our map editor is being improved with these new additions, we're working up new maps and exciting new biomes to battle in, just a few of those additions you can see below like some gorgeous desert staples and gnarled stumps and fall colored trees just in time for Winter:

Four-Legged Friends

And these new maps wouldn't be complete without some variety in our battlers. That's why we've been focused on our four-legged friends and foes, fleshing out animations and getting them ready for the fight ahead. Like our Kitsune Fox friend, Robert, below:

When Robert's ready to get down-and-dirty in battle, he's got those trusty fangs of his ready to tear some chunks out of people:

But there are things more fearsome than Robert (and much larger to boot). Our Forest Spirit, who I affectionately call Marilyn, is ready to walk the Forests once more, defending those sacred spaces with her life (at the cost of yours, if you're not careful):

Cruising For a Bruising

And as always we're expanding the repertoire of our classes, with new portraits and battle animations like our Apothecary and Cavalier's gorgeous art nouveau styled portraits:

Along with this we're making the finishing touches on our Cavalier's two-handed sword strike below, giving both their fighting styles unique animations:

With these new attack animations we've also been working on skill/spell animations, with a shoutout to the marvelous Pixel FX Designer program that allows us to make eye-popping pixel animations through particle systems. (You can find out more about Pixel FX Designer at David Masia's Twitter)

This extends to work on simple animations like those above for the Ranger's storing of power with Charge, and the Cavalier's Body Rush skill that damages and pushes targets away to more complex particle systems like custom graphical work with the Ranger's Arrow Rain animation below:

Come Back Now Ya'll, Ya Hear!?

Before you run off to buy another bottle of Snake Oil or an Ultraball to catch Vulpix, Arcadian Atlas' very own shop keeper wanted to drop in and say hello. He may eat a few bugs, but don't call him out on it. He's very sensitive about those things.